We Have It From One Of
His Own Letters That His Commando At The Time Consisted Of 240 Men,
Of
Whom forty were Free Staters and the rest colonial rebels.
Crewe, Windham, Doran, and Scobell each answered to the call,
But
the young leader was a man of resource, and a long kloof up the
precipitous side of the hill gave him a road to safety. Yet the
operations showed a new mobility in the British columns, which shed
their guns and their baggage in order to travel faster. The main
commando escaped, but twenty-five laggards were taken. The action
took place among the hills thirty miles to the west of
Graaf-Reinet.
On July 21st Crabbe and Kritzinger had a skirmish in the mountains
near Cradock, in which the Boers were strong enough to hold their
own; but on the same date near Murraysburg, Lukin, the gallant
colonial gunner, with ninety men rode into 150 of Lategan's band
and captured ten of them, with a hundred horses. On July 27th a
small party of twenty-one Imperial Yeomanry was captured, after a
gallant resistance, by a large force of Boers at the Doorn River on
the other side of the Colony. The Kaffir scouts of the British were
shot dead in cold blood by their captors after the action. There
seems to be no possible excuse for the repeated murders of coloured
men by the Boers, as they had themselves from the beginning of the
war used their Kaffirs for every purpose short of actually
fighting.
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